BIAN Business Scenarios and Wireframes
BIAN offers business scenarios and wireframes, a process-oriented view on the reference architecture.
A service domain delivers multiple business services. Business scenarios are the process-oriented realizations of services of several service domains. Business scenarios are the interaction of service operations. These service operations interact via the service operation connections to realize the desired outcome of the scenario. Service operations serve one or more business scenarios. Figure 4-1 shows the metamodel for business scenarios. As the ArchiMate Specification makes no distinction between concepts and the instances of the concepts, the service operation visualized in the diagram needs to be interpreted as a set of service operations that serve the business scenarios. Service operation connections are the serve relations between service operations. Before a scenario starts executing, all conditions need to be fulfilled. Conditions at the start of the scenario are called the pre-conditions. Conditions at the end are called the post-conditions.
Business Scenarios
The dynamics of banking are in the offering and delivery of banking services. In a service-oriented banking environment the banking services are realized by an interaction of multiple service operations, together delivering the required outcome.
This interaction of service operations is called a business scenario.
The scope of a business scenario can be compared to that of a conventional high-level business process with one key difference: both describe action steps and some implicit flow of control, but, unlike the business scenario, the business process does not formally divide functionality between discrete service-based partitions (service domains).
In BIAN there is not really a focus on the sequence in which these service operations execute, although BIAN published sequence diagrams to give an idea of how a service can be fulfilled. It explains the context of the interactions. In a service-oriented banking environment the focus is on the interaction, the interoperability of services to exchange information, and information services between the service operations of the service domains. This is expressed in so-called wireframes.
A business scenario is visualized in a UML sequence diagram. An example is shown in Figure 4-2.
At the time of writing, BIAN will not translate this into ArchiMate notation; i.e., a process diagram with service calls.
Wireframes
A wireframe model is a static model, showing the service domains and available connections. Conversely, a business scenario is a dynamic model that shows the temporal pattern of a collection of interactions that are triggered by some business action or event.
Figure 4-3 is an example of a wireframe showing the main service operations for a collection of service domains involved in “Consumer Loan – Interest & Redemption, Collections & Customer Risk Revision”.
At the time of writing, BIAN has not yet translated wireframes into ArchiMate notation. An example of how a wireframe might look in ArchiMate notation is given in Figure 4-4.
These components can now be used to define an organization-specific banking Enterprise Architecture landscape.